Looking back at the letter, ‘All the same,’ he went on, ‘when a young girl writes to one that she’s sure one’s the only person in the world who can tell her exactly who and what (both heavily underlined) she is—well, one’s rather tempted, I must confess, to try yet once more. Because even if she were a camel she’d be a very young one. Twenty-one—isn’t that what she says?’ He turned over a page of the letter. ‘Yes; twenty-one. Also she writes in orange ink. And doesn’t like the Botticellis at the Uffizi. But I hadn’t told you; she’s at Florence. This letter has been to London and back. We’re practically neighbours.
And here’s something that’s really rather good. Listen. “What I like about the Italian women is that they don’t seem to be rather ashamed of being women, like so many English girls are, because English girls seem to go about apologizing for their figures, as though they were punctured, the way they hold themselves—it’s really rather abject. But here they’re all pleased and proud and not a bit apologetic or punctured, but just the opposite, which I really like, don’t you?” Yes, I do,’ Fanning answered, looking up from the letter. ‘I like it very much indeed. I’ve always been opposed to these modern Ars est celare arsem fashions. I like unpuncturedness and I’m charmed by the letter. Yes, charmed. Aren’t you?’
In a voice that trembled with hardly-restrained indignation, ‘No, I’m not!’ Judd answered; and without looking at Fanning, he got up and walked quickly out of the room.
2
Judd had gone to stay with his old Aunt Caroline at Montreux. It was an annual affair; for Judd lived chronometrically. Most of June and the first half of July were always devoted to Aunt Caroline and devoted, invariably, at Montreux. On the fifteenth of July, Aunt Caroline was rejoined by her friend Miss Gaskin and Judd was free to proceed to England. In England he stayed till September the thirteenth, when he returned to Rome—‘for the praying season,’ as Fanning irreverently put it. The beautiful regularity of poor Colin’s existence was a source of endless amusement to his friend. Fanning never had any plans. ‘I just accept what turns up,’ he would explain. ‘Heads or tails—it’s the only rational way of living.
Chance generally knows so much better than we do. The Greeks elected most of their officials by lot—how wisely! Why shouldn’t we toss up for Prime Ministers? We’d be much better governed. Or a sort of Calcutta Sweep for all the responsible posts in Church and State. The only horror would be if one were to win the sweep oneself. Imagine drawing the Permanent Under-Secretaryship for Education! Or the Archbishopric of Canterbury! Or the Vice-royalty of India! One would just have to drink weed-killer. But as things are, luckily . . .’
Luckily, he was at liberty, under the present dispensation, to stroll, very slowly, in a suit of cream-coloured silk, down the shady side of the Via Condotti towards the Spanish Steps. Slowly, slowly. The air was streaked with invisible bars of heat and cold. Coolness came flowing out of shadowed doorways, and at every transverse street the sun breathed fiercely. Like walking through the ghost of a zebra, he thought.
Three beautiful young women passed him, talking and laughing together. Like laughing flowers, like deer, like little horses. And of course absolutely unpunctured, unapologetic. He smiled to himself, thinking of the letter and also of his own reply to it.
A pair of pink and white monsters loomed up, as though from behind the glass of an aquarium. But not speechless. For ‘Grossartig!’ fell enthusiastically on Fanning’s ear as they passed, and ‘Fabelhaft!’ These Nordics! He shook his head. Time they were put a stop to.
In the looking-glasses of a milliner’s window a tall man in creamy-white walked slowly to meet him, hat in hand. The face was aquiline and eager, brown with much exposure to the sun. The waved, rather wiry hair was dark almost to blackness. It grew thickly, and the height of the forehead owed nothing to the approach of baldness. But what pleased Fanning most was the slimness and straightness of the tall figure. Those sedentary men of letters, with their sagging tremulous paunches—they were enough to make one hate the very thought of literature. What had been Fanning’s horror when, a year before, he had realized that his own paunch was showing the first preliminary signs of sagging! But Mr Hornibrooke’s exercises had been wonderful. ‘The Culture of the Abdomen.’ So much more important, as he had remarked in the course of the last few months at so many dinner tables, than the culture of the mind!
For of course he had taken everybody into his confidence about the paunch. He took everybody into his confidence about almost everything. About his love-affairs and his literary projects; about his illnesses and his philosophy; his vices and his bank balance. He lived a rich and variegated private life in public; it was one of the secrets of his charm. To the indignant protests of poor jealous Colin, who reproached him with being an exhibitionist, shameless, a self-exploiter, ‘You take everything so moralistically,’ he had answered. ‘You seem to imagine people do everything on purpose. But people do hardly anything on purpose. They behave as they do because they can’t help it; that’s what they happen to be like. “I am that I am”; Jehovah’s is the last word in realistic psychology. I am what I am—a sort of soft transparent jelly-fish.
While you’re what you are—very tightly shut, opaque, heavily armoured: in a word, a giant clam. Morality doesn’t enter; it’s a case for scientific classification. You should be more of a Linnaeus, Colin, and less the Samuel Smiles.’ Judd had been reduced to a grumbling silence. What he really resented was the fact that Fanning’s confidences were given to upstart friends, to strangers even, before they were given to him. It was only to be expected. The clam’s shell keeps the outside things out as effectually as it keeps the inside things in. In Judd’s case, moreover, the shell served as an instrument of reproachful pinching.
From his cool street Fanning emerged into the Piazza di Spagna. The sunlight was stinging hot and dazzling. The flower venders on the steps sat in the midst of great explosions of colour. He bought a gardenia from one of them and stuck it in his buttonhole. From the windows of the English bookshop ‘The Return of Eurydice, by Miles Fanning’ stared at him again and again. They were making a regular display of his latest volume in Tauchnitz. Satisfactory, no doubt; but also, of course, rather ridiculous and even humiliating, when one reflected that the book would be read by people like that estimable upper middle-class couple there, with their noses at the next window—that Civil Servant, he guessed, with the sweet little artistic wife and the artistic little house on Campden Hill—would be read by them dutifully (for of course they worked hard to keep abreast of everything) and discussed at their charming little dinner parties and finally condemned as ‘extraordinarily brilliant, but . . .’
Yes, but, but. For they were obviously regular subscribers to Punch, were vertebrae in the backbone of England, were upholders of all that was depressingly finest, all that was lifelessly and genteelly best in the English upper-class tradition. And when they recognized him (as it was obvious to Fanning, in spite of their discreet politeness, that they did) his vanity, instead of being flattered, was hurt. Being recognized by people like that—such was fame! What a humiliation, what a personal insult!
At Cook’s, where he now went to draw some money on his letter of credit, Fame still pursued him, trumpeting. From behind the brass bars of his cage the cashier smiled knowingly as he counted out the bank-notes.
‘Of course your name’s very familiar to me, Mr Fanning,’ he said; and his tone was at once ingratiating and self-satisfied; the compliment to Fanning was at the same time a compliment to himself. ‘And if I may be permitted to say so,’ he went on, pushing the money through the bars, as one might offer a piece of bread to an ape, ‘gratters on your last book. Gratters,’ he repeated, evidently delighted with his very public-schooly colloquialism.
‘All gratitude for gratters,’ Fanning answered and turned away. He was half amused, half annoyed. Amused by the absurdity of those more than Etonian congratulations, annoyed at the damned impertinence of the congratulator. So intolerably patronizing! he grumbled to himself. But most admirers were like that; they thought they were doing you an enormous favour by admiring you. And how much more they admired themselves for being capable of appreciating than they admired the object of their appreciation! And then there were the earnest ones who thanked you for giving such a perfect expression to their ideas and sentiments. They were the worst of all. For, after all, what were they thanking you for? For being their interpreter, their dragoman, for playing John the Baptist
